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Milestone
My personal odometer clicked over this afternoon, and I’m sharing it more out of a sense of wonder than anything else. I must be coming out of a lot of car radio speakers.
My first audiobook was released on Audible in August 2011, so next month it’ll be 13 years. I’m recording my 86th book at the moment. I have been very lucky to establish a working relationship with some fine publishers, most especially University Press Audiobooks, an imprint of Redwood Audiobooks. They contract with colleges and universities to get their various publications narrated, and since I love to do histories and biographies, the fit is a good one.
I’ll be retiring from my day job as a tech writer soon, and narrating audiobooks will no longer be a side gig. It’s good to be able to have a craft that isn’t physically demanding and keeps me mentally active. With a life full of books, kids and cats, I am truly blessed.
Published in Work and Hobbies
I can relate.
How exciting, Doug! It should be wonderful to make that shift.
The golden voice carries on.
Congratulations!
Well, iron pyrite maybe. If you want to hear a golden voice doing nonfiction, listen to Stephen Hoye narrating “Our First Revolution” by Michael Barone. A splendid book and an inspiring narration.
Congratulations, Doug. I have enjoyed your audiobooks. The Lincoln book, in particular. I have been considering recording a few books for my young grandchildren. Any advice or tips?
Congratulations Doug! And thank you for getting us some complementary copies although I’m happy to purchase them myself to give you some royalties.
86’th book, but a new chapter. Congratulations on your new endeavor.
It depends on how serious you want to get. One of the things that got me into voice work was reading the Harry Potter books to my kids at night, with a cassette recorder running so we could send the tapes to my mom, who was in a nursing home at the time. It was mostly to stay in touch with Mom, but I learned later that she played the tapes for friends and they thought I should try doing it professionally. Eventually I decided to see if they were just being nice or really meant it, and got some voice coaching. The rest is sheer luck; there are a ton of people looking for voice work, and it’s a serious problem getting noticed. As I noted in the original post, I was lucky to build good working relationships with some publishers (Stevens Press, which has closed its doors but the audiobooks are still available; and Redwood, who are my primary source of new projects).
Start out recording for a half hour or so, don’t do marathons. Try to record at the same time every day; your voice sounds different at different times. That will make it easier to blend the segments together. Record in mono, 44,100 .WAV format, 256Kbps, 16 bit. Transfer the file to your main computer and store a backup copy in a separate subfolder so you can start over if you screw up the editing and mastering process. Don’t ask me how I became OCD about making backups.
The editing software I use is AVS Audio Editor, from AVS4you.com. Simple, inexpensive, and it does the job nicely. Load in your audio file and delete the glitches and re-reads. If you need to do a pickup (re-recording something that you didn’t notice was wrong) you can mark it in AVS. Then you can record a short file with the day’s pickups, and use cut and paste to put the corrections back into your main file. It takes a little practice but I’ve gotten pretty good at making the pickups blend nearly seamlessly. Headphones are necessary. Hardwired ones; bluetooth will drive you crazy with dropouts.
When you’re through editing, run the noise gate tool on the file. This will silence background noises and breathing. It took me a long time to get this right, but I set the threshold at 30 db, attack at 0.5 and release at 20. Run it and listen to five or six minutes to make sure you’re not clipping or deleting too much when you take a breath. If you don’t like it, control-Z the action, tweak the settings and try again.
When the file is properly gated, run the Auto Correction tool on it to normalize the sound levels. Then run the Amplify tool on it to back it down 3 db from peak, so that you don’t get distortion at the loud parts. Finally, save the file in 192 Kbps MP3 format. You will probably want to keep a copy of the WAV file that you have mastered, since MP3 will produce a lower quality file, but it is also a lot smaller than WAV and is universally compatible with smart phones and devices.
That is WAAAY more than you asked for, but it felt good to type it. I’m over-caffeinated this morning. There’s nothing wrong with using an app on your smart phone to record to MP3 and not bothering with all the editing and mastering.
Sounds heavenly. Congrats! Ray reads everything aloud, and he read me the entire Asimov Robot and Foundation novels. Complete with character voices. He sure could do this, and I keep telling him he should.